FASTNACHTS AND PACZKI AND KING CAKES, O MY!

When I first joined the staff at the Main Library many years ago, I'd been only (very) vaguely aware of fastnachts. They had certainly not been a part of my family's Fat Tuesday traditions and I didn't know anyone who ate them when I was growing up. My first Fastnacht (or Fasnacht) Day in Reading found me presented with several variations of the doughnut-like pastry by Berks Countians eager to share this Pennsylvania German cultural food staple.

Unfortunately, my first encounter with a fastnacht was without the benefit of any sweetener, such as turkey syrup (why is it called that, anyway?--it's not poultry flavored! [thank heavens]) or molasses. I was underwhelmed. I could not imagine why people became so excited to nibble on this starchy, almost tasteless dessert bread.

I've never become a fan of the fastnacht, even having eaten them flavored with something sweet. Polish-Americans look forward to consuming paczki every year on Fat Tuesday:

Paczki (pronounced POONCH-key; a single one is a paczek [POTCH-ek]) are in many ways similar to fastnachts in that they are dense, heavy, and fried. Paczki are, however, always filled; prune, cherry, and lemon are among the more customary paczki fillings.

The American South, home to the greatest Mardi Gras celebration in the country (New Orleans), has its own traditional dessert for the holiday.

A king cake is a sweetbread that is usually also filled and topped with sugary icing (Y-U-M!) Traditional king cakes have a trinket baked inside them, which are seen as portents of good fortune to the person who disgorges it. The krewes, or roving string bands that parade throughout New Orleans on Mardi Gras, often select their leader for that august day based on whoever draws the trinket.

Many king cakes have the figure of a baby secreted within them; this tradition grew from the original time of year when this confection was served. Epiphany is the feast celebrated just after Christmas when Christians remember the arrival of the Three Kings to the manger of the infant Jesus. The infant figure represents the Baby Jesus, and the cake is named for the three royal personages who followed a star to find the Christ Child.

This is an example of the Mardi Gras flag; the selection of the New Orleans Mardi Gras colors was done by a member of the Russian royal family. Grand Duke Alexis Romanov was visiting New Orleans in 1872 during the Mardi Gras festivities and was given the honor of selecting which hues would be incorporated into the official banner of the event. He chose purple to represent justice, gold to symbolize power, and green to denote faith; the purple crown in the center indicates Duke's regal bloodline.

Whether you feast on fastnachts, polish off some paczki, or consume a piece of king cake,

Happy Mardi Gras to all...

Good Sources for Online Books

By Librarian Carl

The printed word has undergone a multitude of changes over its history, from papyrus scrolls and wax tablets to parchment manuscripts and paper bound books. The latest format is eBooks. Electronic Books (or eBooks) are digital versions of a traditional print book designed to be read on a personal computer or an e-book reader. Large collections of ebooks are sometimes presented by way of online digital libraries. Although eBooks have been around since the early 1980s, they did not hit the public eye until early 2000.

Many complications over standard format file types, delivery systems, and legal policies are currently plaguing the industry. The field of digital books is constantly growing and changing; thankfully, many easy and free-to-use options exist. This month’s Good Sources column will point you in the right direction.

1) Libraries

Reading Public Library
The Reading Public Library offers a whole host of databases and indexes free to all library members (databases link here and here). One such database is NetLibrary, which offers digital version of books, journals, and other database content.
Link: NetLibrary

Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LC) has both unique eText collections and offers access to a list of databases which
Databases: Databases & E-Resources (Free) (All)
Other Online content: Digital Collections & Services

New York Public Library
Like the LC the NYPL has both their own collection of digital content and offer access to a list of databases.
Databases: Databases and Indexes Online (Free) (All)
Other Online content: Digital Collections

Internet Public Library
IPL offers a list of remote links to various online eBooks and eText.
Online Text Links: http://www.ipl.org/div/subject/browse/hum60.60.00/


2) Other Sources

Project Gutenberg
“Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.”

Internet Archive
“The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others.”

The Online Books Page
“The Online Books Page is an index of e-text books available on the Internet. It is edited by John Mark Ockerbloom and is hosted by the library of the University of Pennsylvania. The Online Books Page lists over 30,000 books, and has several features, such as A Celebration of Women Writers and Banned Books Online.”

Bartleby.com
“Bartleby.com is an electronic text archive, headquartered in New York and named after Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener. It was founded under the name "Project Bartleby" in January 1993 by Steven H. van Leeuwen as a personal, non-profit collection of classic literature on the website of Columbia University.”

The Internet Classics Archive
“Select from a list of 441 works of classical literature by 59 different authors, including user-driven commentary and "reader's choice" Web sites. Mainly Greco-Roman works (some Chinese and Persian), all in English translation.”

Open Library
“Open Library a project designed to create a comprehensive online database of books. It is a project of the Internet Archive. Aaron Swartz is the leader of the Open Library's technical team.”

Google Books
“Google Book Search is a tool from Google that searches the full text of books that Google scans, converts to text using optical character recognition, and stores in its digital database.”

Digital Book Index
“Digital Book Index provides links to more than 145,000 full-text digital books from more than 1800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites. More than 100,000 of these books, texts, and documents are available free, while many others are available at very modest cost.”

The Universal Digital Library
“The Million Book Project (or the Universal Library), led by Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and University Libraries currently has scanned ove 1 million books. Working with government and research partners in India and China, the project is scanning books in many languages, using OCR to enable full text searching, and providing free-to-read access to the books on the web.”

BONUS: CliffNotes
The well known student study guides are now available online and for free!


3) Searching On Your Own

There are many more options for online full text. The above list should get you started with the major general offerings. You can use the following keywords to help you search out various other collections.

Keywords: eBooks, eText, Online Full Text, eContent
Keywords: Digital Library, Electronic Library, Online Library

ORTHOGRAPHY FOR ALL!

RIGHTING THE MOTHER TONGUE, FROM OLDE
ENGLISH TO EMAIL: THE TANGLED STORY OF
ENGLISH SPELLING
by David Wolman
New 421.52 Wol

Orthography is a little-known and relatively caliginous subject; its broadest definition is the investigation as to how spoken language is committed to a written format, including the symbols utilized and the process by which such characters are engendered and employed.

In other words, orthography is a synonym for spelling.

David Wolman plumbs the heady depths of English language spelling in his book Righting the Mother Tongue, etc., which was published in October 2008 by Collins. I love the English language and rejoice in its bizarre spelling traditions. I find it delightful that the letter combination ough can be pronounced in such a bewildering multiplicity of ways. Consider the following words: bough, cough, dough, enough, and through -- each corresponds with the following words, pronunciation-wise: cow, scoff, flow, puff, and zoo. Behold the glorious, mercurial inconsistency of it all!

The feckless irregularities of English are the very things which make it an extremely difficult language to learn. For centuries, English spelling has been the bane of its speakers' existence, and through the ages scores of individuals have petitioned to have its orthography radically simplified. One of the earliest pioneers of such a movement was the father of the English language dictionary: Samuel Butler (an Englishman), who authored one of the earliest lexicons in 1755.

We are perhaps more familiar with Noah Webster, an American who published the first dictionary on U.S. soil in 1806. Webster championed spelling changes not only to make orthography easier to comprehend, but also to highlight the difference between American English and its British parent. Webster's influence brought about the disappearance of the superfluous "u" in the American spelling of such words as honor, valor, and color (in England they remain honour, valour, and colour to this day). President Theodore Roosevelt, author H.G. Wells, and playwright George Bernard Shaw were all devoted disciples of spelling mediation.

I was quite surprised to find Melvil Dewey not only on this illustrious list, but that he was at one time America's most impassioned disciple of the simplified spelling movement. Melvil created the Dewey Decimal System, the numerical classification scheme used by public and school libraries to arrange non-fiction materials. At birth his first name was spelled Melville, but in college he dropped the second "l" and silent "e"--for a brief time he even spelled his surname "Dui" in an effort to prove more phonetic. Dewey was cautioned to stifle his spelling-streamline-mania by his employer at his first job as a librarian, at New York's Columbia University.

Dewey courted the philanthropic paragon Andrew Carnegie and was given a generous allottment of financial support for his spelling simplification efforts (Carnegie was himself a poor speller who was very much in sympathy with Melvil's spelling philosophy.) Clearly, however, Dewey's and his colleagues' designs to reinvent English spelling were met with a stunning paucity of success (although various organizations championing the same cause are still extant today.)

Spelling reform does have its positive points. Children would have a much easier time of things in learning the language, for one; non-English speakers would benefit greatly as well if the many contradictory, illogical, and arcane traditions of our written language were to be eradicated.

On the other hand, spelling reform initiaitves have traditionally met with incredibly robust resistance from the masses. Spelling purists (of whom I am one) find the very concept alarming (indeed!), but the majority just cannot be bothered having to re-learn the nuts and bolts of spelling. One of the reasons English has such convoluted spelling practices is because the bulk of the language is borrowed from other tongues. Wolman shares a very brief list of some examples: bungalow (Hindi), guitar (Spanish), bamboo (Malay), kiosk (Turkish), algebra (Arabic), parasite (Greek), cameo (Italian), and curry (Tamil). A huge number of English words are derived from Dutch and German, the two languages with which English shares the most common ground. Moreover, English has a substantial variety of vowel sounds but very few vowels-- re-establishing spelling rules would mean instituting tortuous letter combinations to represent the same sounds, or inventing altogether new letters.

English, like all languages, is constantly encountering alteration, moderation, permutation, and even corruption. An excellent example of this is the contemporary phenomenon of texting, where "texters" utilize all manner of abbreviation in order to save themselves time and exertion. I find this practice as annoying as I do unseemly; besides which, I end up mouthing what the bizarre alpha-numeric symbols are supposed to mean and become frustrated that I'm not reading actual words.

I laughed at myself at times while reading this book. While the American spelling of the word is catalog, I still insist on writing catalogue, which is the British style. I also append the silent "e" in the purals of words that do not actually require them ("volcanoes") and insist on doubling consonants (also a British holdover) for some words (the plural of "bus" in the U.S. is "buses", which to me looks like the second syllable of the word "abuses", and thus has me pronouncing it the same way when I see it written--I use "busses").

This book is not solely for those of us with a penchant for orthographic chronology. Wolman is a breezy writer whose infectious curiosity and self-deprecating humor make for an engaging style of prose. At the outset he bluntly confesses his spelling ineptitude and part of his interest in this subject was a desire to learn why he has always found the subject so very arduous. Both its tone and content make for a highly enjoyable read and I recommend it unreservedly!

THOSE MAGICAL MUPPETS

STREET GANG: THE COMPLETE HISTORY
OF SESAME STREET
by Michael Davis
New 791.4372 Dav

This book is a comprehensive history of the vastly influential children's program, Sesame Street. The author, Michael Davis, is a resident of the Philadelphia suburb of Yardley; his father actually donated the copy of this title in the Main Library's collection. As a Gen-Xr (how I once loathed that label--until Generation Y was given its own identity, riddled with more issues and negative traits than Generation X--ha, ha!), I was constantly visiting Sesame Street throughout my childhood. I was completely enthralled with The Count (ironic, considering I developed a raging math-phobia around age nine that I've yet to shake), and wanted to live with Big Bird. I was not, however, a fan of Bert, what with his puzzling penchant for pigeons and his preposterous paper clip collection. Sesame Street will celebrate its 40th birthday this year on November 10th.

As a neat tie-in to this fun new title (I haven't gotten to read it yet but it's on my list), I read a Mental Floss article today on the back stories of many Muppet characters (please check out http://www.mentalfloss.com/ for the full article written by Stacy Conradt).

Kermit the Frog's initial incarnation took place in 1955. He was made out of Elizabeth Henson's coat (mother of Jim) and ping-pong balls.

Oscar the Grouch's raspy, angry signature voice was inspired by an irate New York City cab driver. Miss Piggy is a native of Iowa. And Telly Monster was originally supposed to fall into seizure-like paroxysms of euphoria every time he sat down in front of a television set, but his behavior was considered too scary for the young target audience. He was then transmogrified into the perpetual worry-wart best known to Sesame Street aficionados.

I always thought the two balcony-bound hecklers on the Muppet Show were simply fabulous...particularly since I've never liked Fozzie Bear and adored the excoriations the pernicious pair heaped upon the hopelessly untalented ursine comedian. I'd long believed them to be named Astor and Waldorf, having heard they were named for two famous New York City hotels. They're actually named Statler and Waldorf--Statler has gray hair and Waldorf has white hair (plus the mustache). Apparently Waldorf has a wife--appropriately named Astoria (wocka, wocka!). I've also heard that Astoria is actually Waldorf's sister (they're the exact same puppet; the female simply has more hair and no mustache) and Statler's wife, which would make them brothers-in-law.



Finally, according to Ms. Conradt's report, the long-held belief that Bert and Ernie were named after characters in the film It's A Wonderful Life is a total myth. I always thought it was a lovely idea, having the police officer (Bert) and the cab driver (Ernie) from my favorite Christmas movie immortalized in Muppet form on Sesame Street. Sometimes the truth hurts...

My nieces and nephews are now happily entranced with Sesame Street as well as the sadly-defunct Muppet Show (on DVD) and I find it heartwarming to bond with them over their favorite characters (unless someone likes Fozzie Bear...or Animal...)

NOTE: On February 11, CNN ran an article titled How Do You Get To 'Sesame Street'? by Todd Leopold detailing Street Gang, etc. by Michael Davis. It's well worth a read!